Hard disk drives with integrated NAND Flash storage chips are doing well

Sep 11, 2014 07:12 GMT  ·  By

Most people probably don't use hybrid hard drives, or solid state hybrid drives as Seagate calls them, but they've probably at least heard about them, if not held one in their own two hands. The products are definitely doing well for themselves though.

In fact, Seagate saw fit to celebrate its latest accomplishment in this particular segment: the sale of the 10 millionth SSHD (a term that stands for solid state hybrid drive).

The point to merging hard disk drives and solid state drives is to combine the huge capacity of magnetic storage platters (HDD) with the speed of NAND Flash chips (the SSD).

Thus, while capacity of the SSD part is a lot lower than the HDD part, it makes up for it by storing the OS and most frequently used data, ensuring quick booth and file access. Basically, performance is dramatically increased for the system.

All the while, all data is backed up on the HDD section as part of a background process that doesn't use almost any resources at all.

Seagate's success

As one of the three main (and only remaining really) providers of HDDs, Seagate had to get creative in order to keep its future secured.

You see, despite the way HDDs continue to be used in PCs, servers, and whatever else, SSDs have been reducing their capacity disadvantage steadily, while raising their performance.

Because of this, many customers are employing SSDs, especially since most PC makers put emphasis on SSD caching technologies (having both an HDD and an SSD in the same system).

Seagate's SSHDs, like Western Digital's and Toshiba's equivalent drives, bypass that need by putting both storage technologies in the same package, freeing up one SATA connector and drive bay for other things and reducing power needs as well.

That said, demand has been rising rapidly over the past two years, with the increase between FY2013 and FY2014 being of 400%.

The main source of demand

IT organizations, enterprises, and data center runners are the primary clients for Seagate's SSHDs. The habit such customers have of buying things in bulk is the main reason why this rapid shipment rate has been registered.

The demand spike will continue over the next few years, but it will probably start to slow down and eventually reach a semblance of stability. Probably during the 2020-2025 period, or maybe even sooner. Cloud computing will, after all, need to grow quick because of the Internet of Things initiative, which wants to connect everything powered by electricity to central hubs.

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